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If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 2015 it’s the importance of networking. The very mention of this word used to make me shudder. It seemed alien to me – something aggressive, maybe imported from the US along with ‘reaching out’. I saw networking as a situation that forced you into small talk with people you didn’t want to get to know but felt you had to (I still think it is to some extent). No, that isn’t for me, I thought. I’d rather just make friends with people I like and stick with them.

Until I realised that your entire career can be affected by the doing of it or the not doing of it. How people who have reached the peak of their careers are pretty much all skilled networkers who have made it their business to get to know everyone and the information that they can provide. And I’d been oblivious to it until earlier this year. In case you’re like me, and totally unaware of this underbelly of activity in publishing, or indeed in any industry, then this is my gift to you. The gift of knowing about Secret Coffee.

Here’s the thing. I thought I *was* networking when I turned up to industry events like publishing conferences or debate evenings. I’d meet up with colleagues, ex-colleagues and the faces behind the Twitter accounts I’d befriended and socialise with them, maybe adding one or two faces to the group each time I attended one.

There would always be one or two people who would suggest meeting up for a coffee after the conference, and I’d always think, “Why? When we’re standing right here talking now?” It’s because I didn’t know that the thing to do was Secret Coffee. I thought that just by standing there talking to someone in public, that my networking job was done. It wasn’t.

When I was freelancing over the summer I discovered the world of Secret Coffee and how people at all ranks in the publishing industry are more than happy to do it. I had Secret Coffees almost every day, in fact, and listened to people tell me all about the people they’d had Secret Coffee with over the years.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it – it’d been going on all around me for years. Nobody talks about it so I’m just putting it out there in case there are other people like me who would benefit from it. I’m naturally an open, shary person who doesn’t enjoy secret behaviour but if I’d known about it years ago, perhaps I’d’ve made myself do it more. It does seem to have fuelled a number of high-rise careers all around me, when I thought that just being good at your job, friendly, sociable and professionally visible would be enough. It’s not. Quite.

I have baulked when a friend has told me that they’re only friendly with a person because of how useful they can be to them, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop baulking at that, but it does seem that successful people don’t have an issue with it – perhaps because they believe their coffee pals feel the same way.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been really grateful to my Secret Coffee drinkers over the past months, as they’ve been incredibly generous with their time and contacts lists. But I’m passing on that generosity by telling you now – if you want to get on in your careers, then start by doing Secret Coffee. It may be the best move you ever make in your career.

Last night I chaired a panel discussion at Byte the Book, a monthly networking club for authors and people who work in publishing. The debate was focused on the new array of independent publishing houses and the question of the importance of editorial came up. Predictably, the panellist from a marketing and sales background said it was unnecessary, and the panellist from an editorial background said it was central to his company ethos. As an editor by trade myself, I ended up wading in a reminding panellist A that there is more to editorial than correcting commas and typos.

This is an all-too-common misconception about editorial work. People inside and outside the industry think that we just correct spellings, grammar and punctuation, and that’s it. Job done. But these are things that are done at the very END of a book’s editorial life, and they are often outsourced to freelance copy-editors and proofreaders AFTER the big, ‘structural’ edit has been done by the commissioning editor. The bigger companies have a ‘desk editorial’ pool that will complete this work for them, and if the desk editor feels that a bigger change to the text needs to be made, they will discuss it in detail with the commissioning editor and/or directly with the author before making it.

But what of the editorial work that takes place before this part of the life of a book? And why does the world and her partner think it’s so easy that everyone can do it?

Let’s say a commissioning editor has bought a fully written text, they love it, they’ve shared the love with the author, the agent and everyone in-house and persuaded them to acquire it for the list. But, they know it could be EVEN BETTER if the narrative was re-shaped in certain ways – perhaps a character needs to be drawn out or cut completely, maybe more or less dialogue is needed, perhaps the author could magnify a particular event to make it more dramatic or a non-fiction text needs more factual information to make sense of the point it’s trying to make.

It’s our job to let authors know how we think the text they’ve supplied can be improved, and to deliver that information in the way that allows THEM to make the changes successfully. It’s a collaboration, and if the author disagrees with a note, then it’s their right to resist that change, but maybe suggest another one. I’ve watched TV producers give ‘notes’ to actors and crew on set and realised how similar it is to the editorial process. Do the actors or writers think it’s a waste of time? No. They listen carefully and go for another (improved) shot. If they think a scene can be improved by something they’ve thought of, they tell the producer or director and it is discussed. Together.

Most commissioning editors give broadbrush notes to start with, to allow authors the freedom to make the changes in the way they see fit. Then at the next draft stage, because at this stage we’re only talking about a ‘draft’ text, then they’ll go in with an Editorial Letter. There’s an art to these. You’ve got to know the author well during the acquisition process and you learn to flex to their way of working. Some authors only like broadbrush comments, others prefer masses of detail. Some react strongly to red pen all over their text, so you go for blue, or you don’t write on the text at all – it all goes into the letter.

The best editors know that this is the author’s baby and it is important to bring the best out of it. You owe it to them, and nine times out of ten a text needs another close eye on it to really make it sing. And therein lies the joy and why your authors can end up loving you. (This can go wrong if the editor has a strong urge to be an author themselves, as they can transfer their own writerly ambitions onto the text, but I think this is a rare occurrence.)

You may be at draft five or six before the text is ready to be copy-edited (the stage where the grammar, punctuation and typos are corrected) but even then, any significant changes are discussed with author and commissioning editor in case there are stylistic considerations, e.g. not all authors use traditional speech marks during dialogue scenes. Ideally the copy-editor and proofreader are briefed on stylistic notes before they begin, so that they don’t undo all the editorial work done so far during the final stages.

All the way through this process there are phone conversations – fraught and joyous; to-ings and fro-ings re ideas for improving the text; changing the ending, or placing chapter 3 after chapter 10. It’s a constant conversation that never really stops until the book goes to print (and even then corrections can be made on reprint).

In recent years there has been a move away from traditional editing, partly due to the rise in self-publishing. We all know how many red pens have been twitching over the Fifty Shades trilogy – the Inner Goddess would’ve been the first to go if I’d been editing it. And then the near-universal agreement among readers and editors that The Goldfinch could’ve done with a really good chop to make it even more brilliant than it already is. (Sometimes, as authors reach the bestseller heady heights a fear of editing kicks in in the publishing company (in case the author is scared off) and you can track it as their books get bigger and bigger.)

I’ve just finished The Miniaturist and felt so frustrated that this wonderful concept died on its feet 50% into the book – in case you’re interested, my editorial notes would’ve been a) the book tries to cover too many themes at once: black history, female independence, homosexuality so focus in on one or two, and b) either ramp up the significance of the miniature house and its creator or get rid of it all together. The former would be my preference.

Some authors have decided to eschew being edited at all and I await to see what happens when they run free. Only this last week, Cornelia Funke has decided to set up her own publishing company because she objected to Little, Brown US and her UK publisher Chicken House, asking her to move a chapter and change the ending of her latest book.

Her UK publisher Barry Cunningham said, “We had some editorial thoughts about the direction of the last book that she didn’t agree with,” he said. “One of the purposes of a publisher is to edit so if we felt there was a better book to be made and she didn’t then we have reached the best conclusion.”

I think, sadly, we are going to see more of this ‘parting of the ways’ as editorial skills are becoming less and less valued by authors, readers and let’s face it, some publishers (if they’re led by sales people, as most are these days).

I’m always amazed that so many people in my own industry don’t know what my job entails, so how do we bring the value back?

I’ve just attended the IT as a Utility (ITaaU) conference in the Solent University Conference Centre, Southampton, as a guest of the co-ordinator, Steve Brewer (@SteveITaaU). It is a community of researchers, practitioners and policymakers from a range of disciplines who investigate ways in which IT can help services, businesses and communities thrive.

Steve Brewer opening ITaaU conference (photo via Clare Hooper)

As a publishing consultant, I’m not an obvious delegate for this, but I’ve been to enough conferences to know that the real value is in meeting outside your usual network. I was piqued by sessions on interactive storytelling and the future of libraries so I decided to go. And hey – spending two days in Southampton isn’t half bad.

As somewhat of a lay-person when it comes to IT the themes and trends I picked up were fairly broad brush, but I did think there were some ideas and threads that were common to people working in any medium, which I’ll share here.

The Rush to Digitise

Something that resounded with me in publishing was the rush to digitise existing content, without any thought to how it may be used in the future. It’s something that’s hamstrung the NHS and they are busy looking at ways to unpick the mass PDF-ing of documentation. I thought of how we all rushed to convert our backlists into ebooks back in the day, and how a few voices were heard crying out, ‘wait, wait, what if we need to apply digital thinking to all our processes?’ and their voices dying in the wind. It’s only now that I’m hearing people in publishing say that digital is part of their everyday thinking and is no longer thought of as a separate department.

In publishing, one often finds books set on immovable tracks, set on a timescale to launch that doesn’t take in any sort of agility or ability to stop and think, ‘are we doing the right thing here?’ The thought of scrapping a book package and starting again because it’s not working – how many of us would be prepared to work through the night with a bunch of hacks to get it right? We’d be worried that the jacket was ‘already out there’ in sales kits and we’d confuse retailers and consumers with our switching.

Agility is something that we’ve weeded out of our thinking because of our need to hit Nielsen deadlines 7-9 months before publication. We have to wait until the paperback to get a second bite of the cherry, but then, our sales may have been damaged by the hardback package. Anyway…

Hackathons

In publishing, we’ve had two very successful hackathons that I know of – one in the US in 2013 and the last in the UK in June 2014 (Futurebook Hack). I was struck at ITaaU by the way that the hack is at the very heart of most of the organisations that presented. Coming from a holacratic way of working, everyone is invited to the table to innovate, and I was particularly struck by the way in which people innovated on things that were already in front of them (Periscope was developed from porn-video technology).

One speaker used the overhead projector right in front of him to present, placing his iPhone on it and touching the screen to show his app. I thought, ‘that’s innovation, right there’. (He’d also hastily scribbled his name and job title in biro on a bit of paper which he shoved under the projector – brilliant). It made me think of how I’d used a secret Pinterest board to tell my career-in-publishing story at an SYP event because I couldn’t get Prezi to work. I innovated! A hackathon has to be at the heart of everyday life for it to really have an effect, not just once a year at a big publishing conference…

Makerspaces – the new libraries?

I discovered that a makerspace is the new library. Libraries in the US, and to a certain extent in the UK are now not only places where books are housed, but where information is exchanged and the tools for innovation are housed for communities to use, including 3D printers and laser cutters. Of course I’m behind the #saveourlibraries campaign, but I do believe that they need to adapt and expand their brief (even change their brand name) to be more relevant to today’s community needs. (They’ve never been just about books – we know that.)

I met the inspiring Ross Dalziel who has been working on Cloudmaker, which explores the gap between online Minecraft gaming and the real world, with communities of kids seeing their constructions printed out in 3D, and the mindblowing ‘Minecraft of Things’ in which messages are passed to and from objects in the real world and the Minecraft game. Astonishing levels of creativity and ‘beyond the brick’ thinking.

Ross Dalziel’s scribblings from our libraries break-out session

Social Machines

I learned about the power of humans as social machines from Elena Simperl, professor of Web and Internet Science at University of Southampton. I hadn’t heard about Project Gutenberg, which aims to digitise public domain texts using projects such as Distributed Proofreaders, which divides out-of-copyright ebooks into individual pages to be proofread and copy-edited by the a volunteer ‘crowd’. Or the Streetbump app that collects data on potholes in Boston by collecting GPS/smartphone data from volunteer users in order to improve the community’s roads. The idea that real people do the creative work whilst computers do the administration is at the heart of good crowdsourcing activity.

Interactive storytelling

Blending storytelling, wearable tech and interactive theatre, Zoe Philpott brings the story of Ada Lovelace to life as a mathematician, Babbage collaborator and author of the world’s first computer programme. Determined that this incredible woman will not be written out of history, as she nearly was, Philpott is bringing her one-woman show to non-theatre venues, wearing a dress made of 500 LED lights and conductive thread, which is controlled with a glove. I started to think of the ways she could collaborate with museum people I know and made the connections on Twitter immediately. People shouted out names of potential venues from the audience, inspired by this single innovative idea.

Zoe Philpott telling us about Ada Ada Ada (photo via Alana Wood)

As I walked to the station with a clutch of business cards, new friends and ideas swimming around in my head, I recalled Zoe’s words: “we didn’t know what we needed to know until we came here.”

The wonderful news that William Grill won the Kate Greenaway Medal for Illustration today made me whoop with joy, for illustrated non-fiction books are having a renaissance, and it’s about time. As Grill is purported to have said, non fiction is seen as ‘unglamorous’ next to fiction and picture books and it doesn’t have to be that way. As someone whose career has involved the publishing of Horrible Histories and all its satellite series, I say ‘amen’ and ‘I hear you’ to that. We haven’t had such a great a non-fiction moment since Dragonology first hit the scene back in 2003 from Templar. Filled with wheels, tabs, flaps and fold-outs, not to mention ‘jewels’ set into the covers, these books set the standard for a type of gift non fiction that everyone suddenly started to aspire to.

Dragonology (Templar)

Dragonology (Templar)

We all started doing versions of the ‘ologies’ until the 2008 recession hit us, print costs went sky-high and no one would pay £19.99 for a book any more. In children’s books at least, the emphasis suddenly went from pop-up carousels and feats of paper-engineering to ‘straight’ books, and even fewer illustrated ones. Every publisher knows that B-format black-and-white fiction is where the money and the profit is at, so the ship steered well away from high-production-value non fiction and gift books. Happily for us, the digital-induced renaissance in high-quality gift books is giving non fiction another moment. I noticed it first appearing in 2013 with Maps (Big Picture Press), the beautifully illustrated atlas by Alexandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski.

Maps – Big Picture Press

Maps – Big Picture Press

We were all stunned by the intricately rendered artwork by the Bologna Ragazzi-winning couple, clearly the work of many months. It has spawned a new genre of nostalgically illustrated large-format gift books, most notably in 2014, Animalium (Big Picture Press) by Jenny Broom and Katie Scott, and Wide-Eyed Editions’ Atlas of Adventures (Rachel Williams & Lucy Netherland) and Nature’s Day (Danielle Kroll & Kay Maguire).

Animalium (Big Picture Press)

In adult books, another sort of non-fiction renaissance is happening as illustrated publishers compete for gift-book slots with lavishly bound, be-ribboned, embossed and gilded-edged titles, such as Where Chefs Eat (Phaidon) and my favourite, Tequila Mockingbird(Running Press).

Where Chefs Eat (Phaidon)

Tequila Mockingbird (Running Press)

I’ve been told that Waterstones buyers won’t even look at a non-fiction Christmas gift title unless it has all the bells and whistles, and indeed publishers are creating bespoke special editions for them. The conversations happening between editors, designers, production controllers and printers are in a really interesting place right now as they look beyond traditional book formats, trying to outdo the competition with the next big widget. Of course, Information is Beautiful (HarperCollins, 2009) and the follow-up Knowledge is Beautiful by David McCandless was the game-changer in the adult world for non fiction. Purely and simply, his infographics presented information in such a visually accessible way, they are beautiful in themselves. His books provide ‘learning by stealth’ for adults and both of his books deserve a place on every bookshelf, and in every gift-givers list. No widgets required – the artistry is simply on the page.

Information is Beautiful (HarperCollins)

With the emphasis on gift books to collect and treasure as objects, I predict that the non-fiction future is beautiful.

There’s a lot of anxiety about reading these days. There’s my own anxiety about losing my ‘reading mojo’ a couple of years ago when I was going through a stressful time, and more recently friends are telling me that they can’t get into a novel because their mind is distracted by social media and their attention span has been reduced to the level of a gnat.

(What is the attention span of a gnat? Just wondering).

Anyway, I think we are in the midst of a Reading Anxiety Epidemic. I know that I can only really get into a novel while on holiday, when wifi access is limited and my mind is free of distraction. If I read a novel at home, it is fitful and stop-starty – not the ideal way to immerse myself in a literary work.

When I talk to people about their reading they are often really worried that they haven’t read a book in ages, or can’t find the time to devote to it, yet they continue to stack up paperbacks on their bulging bookshelves or add ebooks to their Kindle wishlist. Just to add to the guilt.

The same people are often plagued by the books they’ve never read – usually the ‘classics’ – and then they start Ulysses and can’t get beyond ten pages. That then stops them reading anything else because they feel they ‘must’ finish Ulysses before being ‘allowed’ to read something ‘trashy’. (Define trashy, I say).

The two female friends I spoke to seemed very worried about online distractions, their gnat-like attention spans and the growing pile of books in the corner. One of them had even worked out how many books she’d read if they only read one per year for the rest of her life, and was already anxious that it wasn’t nearly enough. What is enough?

The percentages on Kindle help some people tick off their reading in a satisfying way – for me and other people it’s about seeing the chunk of pages we’ve read and marking how far we have to go with a bookmark or, dare I say it, a folded corner. But this implies that we think of reading as a chore, or an achievement, rather than simply a pleasurable experience. Why is that? Why do we think we must read, as opposed to just doing it? And why do we think we must read Ulysses before we can read mass-market fiction?

I think we know that our inner lives are enriched by the experience of reading a book, and our horizons broadened. We know that it enriches our vocabulary and makes us see the world in other ways. It is the process of inhabiting another human brain for days, and coming out enlightened. It is harder work than watching TV – we have to fully engage with the world we are presented with and it inhabits us as we inhabit it. If we read something we think is ‘trash’ we enjoy it, but know it’s not quite doing the same job.

We know we’re in the middle of an epidemic because everyone has started referring to the time it takes to read something. First came the ‘short read’ and the ‘long read’ – I’m still a little unclear on what the timings are on those – and now we’re into an era of timed reading.

Lauren Laverne’s new initiative, The Pool, has organised its features into timed-reading slots for ‘women who are too busy to browse’ (should that be ‘too busy to read?’). Similarly, curated feed site Medium displays a read-time for every post. (I assume these are based on an average reading speed – some people I know are fast skimmers, others take much longer).

If the idea here is to gravitate from a one-minute read to a 12-minute read – which I do regularly on those sites – then I wonder if our ‘gateway’ back to more contented reading lives is via something we’ll enjoy and read quickly, rather than a Tolstoy epic. That’s how I got my reading mojo back.

So whether it’s the new novel Grey by E L James or a bit of Brad Meltzer, we could start by opening up our poor short-circuiting brains and giving them a break from Ulysses. Put all the lists of what we should read that we are bombarded with to one side and start with what we actually want to read.

I’m interested to hear about other people’s reading anxieties, why you think we have them and what you’re doing to combat if you think we should.

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Lisa Edwards (Redwoods)

I am a publishing consultant with twenty years experience in the industry, mainly in children's books. I like to write about books, reading, the publishing industry, as well as my other passions: solo travel, running, fashion and life in London.

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